You know that individuals can become mad. Not angry, but psychotic, defined as having a mental break with reality as reality is perceived by nearly all people outside the system in which person deemed to be mad lives.
One of the features of madness, or psychosis, is that you can't see it under a microscope the way you can with a bacteria or virus-caused infection.
Madness is in the head, and while a blow (called an 'insult'), or a bacteria or virus, or other agent that destroys brain cells from alcohol to drugs to prions (believed to cause such diseases as Alzheimer's, Jakob-Creuzfeld, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy aka Mad Cow Disease said to be so-called because PMS had already been taken) may cause sufficient brain damage (called organic brain damage resulting in organic brain syndrome) to result in psychosis, there are other more subtle causes of madness.
People have been driven mad by the circumstances of their life which put them at odds with their society.
The question of whether a person is mad is a function of how others view their thought and behavior. One of the measuring sticks is the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory, in which the test subject is asked to answer some 500 short-answer questions by filling in the box of choice with a graphite pencil that can be scored electronically by running the answer sheets through a computer to obtain a written read-out based on the answers given by thousands of test subjects who themselves were individually rated across many axes of personality, character, etc., described in the DSM-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Ver. 4, used in American psychology and psychiatry for the past 35 years or so. The definitions of what constitutes a mental illness are word-formulations which are the product of committees of psychiatrists and psychologists who submit findings and proposals to the larger group which votes on what is accepted as a mental illness and what isn't.
Naturally the scientific process is combined with a political process. Is homosexuality an illness? It was at one time, reflecting the dominant views of the medical profession at the time. Views change.
The Soviets were much criticized for ordering political dissidents into mental institutions. Perhaps the Soviet theory was that a critic of the socialist heaven must therefore be crazy. Or perhaps a mental institution represented a merciful break from a worse fate, being sent to the Gulag Archipelago, the many islands of prison camps dotting Siberia, the traditional place of exile under the Czars and the Communists alike. See One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner himself, and had his book, written on toilet tissue as I recall, smuggled out. It became big in the West when I was a student.
Or you could ride the Muni bus and see the madmen riding from place to place, making their florid displays for the edification of fellow riders. This is the excuse for having a car when you don't need one.
Why does the driver allow this obviously deranged person to board the bus and annoy the sane passengers, one may wonder. This raises certain Constitutional questions including the power of a bus driver to make snap diagnoses of sanity, madness, or border-line cases in the time it takes the subject to board the bus and start-in, which necessarily brief.
Once bus drivers are given the power to assign diagnoses and toss riders off buses for madness, we are all placed at risk. Mad and sane people each think they are sane. This is the problem. Madmen never agree that there is anything wrong with them. They feel, perhaps not totally unjustified, that it is the world that has gone mad, a group diagnosis of immense grandiosity.
Yet societies do go mad, as mad as the wildest individual on a city bus or locked in a mental ward. It is even more difficult to deal with societal madness than individual.
One of the chief symptoms that a society has gone mad is its willingness to accuse and condemn innocent people in the name of protecting children. This sentence covers a world of hurt. Let me give you a few examples.
The ancient Athenians forced Socrates to drink the poison-hemlock after convicting upon a trial which gave him due process of law of "corrupting the youth." He had encouraged students to question the assumptions of their parents, a most subversive thing to do in any society.
Who was mad?
Socrates or the Athenians?
Why did the fatal accusation take the form of "corrupting the youth"? Perhaps it was because the Athenians were unable to pin on Socrates anything as rich as treason or murder. Abusing children is enough to condemn one in any society.
In our own society, if you will be so gracious as to allow the inclusion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the term "our," one of our honored forbear colonies, founded in 1630, under John Winthrop, late of the sailing vessel, Mayflower, we experienced an episode in 1692, in the village of Salem, an incident in which 19 women who had led legally blameless lives were hanged as witches.
Unless you are a huge believe in witches and devils, all of these women, who were given all of the due process, including facing their accusers in an open and public jury trial of their peers, and being allowed to speak and challenge the evidence, were as innocent as you and all the members of your family are of witchcraft.
In France during the Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was guillotined after a public trial in which she was tried for being the queen of a nation that had changed its fundamental attitude from seeing the monarchy as legitimate to seeing it as illegitimate. It was now a budding republic, which is a term meaning the antithesis of a monarchy. In a monarchy, the king rules. In a republic, the people rule through elected representatives. This is why we like the word republic and republican, as they sound democratic. True republicans don't shout, "God save the Queen."
Marie-Antoinette was a true monarchist who got way out of step with the country which had adopted her. France, the monarchy for almost a millennium, needed its monarchs to produce babies, princes and princesses, to keep the system going. As old kings died off, they needed to be replaced by their legitimate heirs. Kingship was inheritable. That was the only way it could work down the generations. Stability was achieved, and war avoided, by allowing the throne to descend to the crown-prince, the oldest boy. The people could live with this. For a thousand years.
But over the years, things happened. Certain dislocations and instabilities became apparent when crunch-time occurred, such as a series of cold winters and bad harvests. When the price of bread became too dear to afford, the government was at risk of overthrow, which is what happened.
Other influences had also been at work. French thinkers ("philosophes") such as Montesquieu, had influenced American revolutionaries such as Madison and Jefferson. Upon the success of the American Revolution from France's enemy, Britain, the French were inspired to give it a go themselves.
Thomas Paine, one of our inspiring writers who favored the American Revolution went to France to try his hand there, as well. Thomas Jefferson was a notorious Francophile, while his major antagonist, Alexander Hamilton, was a Francophobe.
America divided over the French Revolution.
France enabled us to succeed in our Revolution, providing the navy, the gunpowder, and much of the money.
Washington's victory at Yorktown was thanks to the French admiral, De Grasse, blockading Chesapeake Bay to prevent the British fleet from reinforcing Cornwallis before his army was defeated in battle and forced to surrender. The world had turned upside down.
Unfortunately for Marie-Antoinette, she had been brought up to believe that rule of a nation by a monarch was the way the world was set up and should be set up. Her mother, Marie-Therese of Austria was, after all, the Empress there.
At age fourteen, Marie-Antoinette was married off to Louis, the crown prince of France, the son of Louis XV, in one of those arranged marriages used to insure the preservation of the system and cement an alliance between hostile neighbors for awhile, at least. She was not a sophisticate child. She was a rich teeny-bopper thrust into an adult power system at Versailles that did not enchant her. She liked to play games with friends.
As a foreigner, and an Austrian to boot, married to the ultimate wimp, a man who for seven years could not succeed in impregnating her, in a nation where impregnating one another is the national avocation, Marie-Antoinette became much hated by the ordinary people who, in many cases, could not afford bread, as the price of wheat had risen so much under her husband, who had succeeded to the thrown as Louis XIV. He had been guillotined a few years before she was.
As an unrepentant monarchist, Marie-Antoinette seems to have been fair game for dis-enthronement or exile. Why the French needed to behead this mother of four, of whom two survived her, is beyond me, except to say that we are dealing with revolutionaries who have lost their political and moral bearings while seeking new and different ones, not quite properly developed.
Marie-Antoinette was being held, awaiting her fate, in a place called the Conciergerie, where her jailers charged admission for the curious to gaze on her in captivity, as we do chimpanzees at the zoo. She and her two children were later transferred to a place called the Tower, an ancient dungeon-like pile. Her son was removed from her and placed in a cell where she could sometimes see him. He was seven-years old. She was being demonized in the press, in scurrilous, pornographic prints, and in conversation everywhere in Paris, if not all of France.
First you demonize, and then you condemn. The two go hand in hand. It happens in marriages. This is the soil from which grow false accusations.
The boy's jailers beat him, and fed him wind. They taught him songs of the Revolution. Those must have included the Marseillaise, today's national anthem of France, originally a soldiers marching song, and Ca Ira, another of the same and equally catchy, with its references to hanging monarchists and aristocrats from the lamp-posts, a favored public display of disapproval.
At the trial of his mother, her seven-year old son, after long captivity, beating, and indoctrination by his captors, denounced Marie-Antoinette as a sexual molester, of him.
Asked to respond by the court, Marie-Antoinette turned and faced the audience and stated that she was addressing the mothers in the audience of revolutionaries who had predetermined that she was to lose her head immediately. She shamed them, by calmly saying that she would offer no defense, but would observe the conditions under which he had spoken, and that she was a mother, and that they were mothers, and that was all that she wished to say to them and to the court.
The prosecutor dropped further questioning on the charge.
The next day she was guillotined for what she was, a queen in a land that had turned its back on monarch.
The story of Marie-Antoinette appeared last evening on the Public Broadcasting System, PBS.
I was most interested in the aspect about the boy in captivity who had been induced by his captors to denounce his mother when she was on trial for her life.
The incident brought back my experience representing parents falsely accused of sexual molestation by their children, as to which I've written. The links are in the lower left margin of this blog.
I also recalled some of the two leading examples of captive-captor relations.
There is the story of the rape of the Sabine women, by I don't know who, but the Broadway musical and later Hollywood movie starring Howard Keel is "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." The gist is that back in the day the way you got your bride was the way you got your cattle. You went raiding for them and what you succeeded in bringing back was yours. The cattle became your steak, the women your wives. According to legend the women grew to accept and even love this. Caveat the legends.
During the Korean War, some of our soldiers were captured by the North Koreans, who did not treat them well, sort of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo squared, which is one of the reasons I'm so down on Pres. Bush for condoning mistreatment of prisoners.
Following the Armistice in 1953, there was a prisoner exchange. A lot of the North Koreans we had taken prisoner didn't want to go home. What to do with them was a big problem. What does the free world do with prisoners who don't want to go home to Communism? It was Elian Gonzales and Cuba inside out.
But far more shocking to the American people was that 22 of our soldiers, including some officers up to the rank of major, refused to be repatriated back to us. They had "turned coat," as the expression has it. They'd gone over to the enemy.
In Stockholm, during a take-over bank robbery, the gang of robbers herded the female tellers into the vault. When police surrounded the place, the stand-off took days, maybe a week to resolve with the capture of the robbers, peacefully, following hostage negotiations, and the release of the prisoners.
Only a peculiar thing had happened. Some of the women had apparently fallen in love with their captors and had been sleeping with them during the takeover. One hostage later married her captor. Maybe there's more to the Sabine women legend than we're willing to admit.
"Stockholm Syndrome" has since become a way of trying to explain how some people seem able to dominate the mind of others such that the latter will do the bidding of the former. This was the police theory, or one of the mis-applied theories of the Foxglove case in which I represented an attractive young woman in jail for two years under an indictment that would keep her there for life, had it been true. The old men who loved her and plied her with gifts were said by the police to have become victims of her wiles, or charms, depending on whose side you were on, and whether you believe that they had been captivated in a literal sense.
How do captors induce their victims, or captives, to side with them? Patti Hearst, the kidnap victim of the Symbionese Liberation Army, 74, is another example. The captured newspaper heiress was put to robbing banks. Kidnap me and I'll rob all the banks you want to stay alive, is my theory. I'll deal with the authorities later. It's you I'm worried about today, since you have power of life and death over me and please point that gun elsewhere, I'm going, I'm going.
It seemed to me that it is common for people to adapt to their captors. Little children do it. If you have the power of life and death over your infant, which you do, what is that child to do? Her survival depends on being able to read your mood, from the way you hold her, or don't, and clean her, and feed her, or don't, and change her, and keep her warm and comforted, or don't, etc. To stay alive that child has to read you better than you read yourself. And so she does, even before being able to understand words, or speak, or read. Children are expert readers of adults in authority.
So are adults, especially when held in captivity and every glance can mean life or death.
When you are so totally dependent on the good will of another human who has life and death power over you, who can feed and withhold food and water, who can beat the living daylights out of you, or treat you kindly, on a whim, it is in your interest to show your captor how much you really and truly do side with him. You will marry that person. You will denounce your mother.
So far I'm only describing the facts of the above classic cases as I understand them. I'm not purporting to describe what psychological mechanisms account for them. I'm not sure that I need to do that. Relating the examples is an explanation of its own.
All of these things came back to me when I watched the program on Marie-Antoinette on PBS last evening. I think they're important not to forget. Which is why I write them here, for someday, someone else will need to be aware of such things. Teaching, I call it, from experience.
But we began this by noting that societies can go nuts, and that one of the symptoms of this is the willingness to bring charges based on the idea that it is the children who have been harmed, even though no harm is shown, or if a child has been showing signs of harm, blaming it on a presumed cause, such as that a parent molested the child, without proof, other than the influenced behavior of the child.
In Britain, in the Cleveland Affair, about 1987, a police doctor took to examining the rectums of juveniles who'd been brought in by the police for whatever. The doctor noticed that in probing rectums of children, sometimes they opened wide. "Aha!" he reasoned, these children have been buggered. Buggery, or anal intercourse, must loom large in the British mind, while we, at least, don't use the word. Because this doctor had this wild theory that children whose rectums opened upon inspection were abnormal, and that the abnormality was the result of buggery, guess what happened.
Not only were over 50 children removed from their parents and put "into care," as the expression went (I'd call it legalized kidnapping, myself, but there I go again, railing against foolishness), but charges were being brought against innocent parents. Someone had gone crazy, either the parents in buggering their own children, or the police surgeon, or the British authorities in removing children from parents and prosecuting the parents.
It is unusual to discover in a small town anywhere 50 parents who bugger their children. Show me a place where this is said to occur and I am more apt to suspect the police or child protective authorities than I am the parents. Of course I've had dealing with child protective authorities and juvenile inspectors of police, so I may have an unfair advantage.
The result in Cleveland, England, was that the parents began picketing the police station, the press took up the cry, and Parliament was forced to set up an investigative committee, headed by Elizabeth Butler, a friend I met when I addressed a judges group at the Judges College at the University of Reno, Nevada. Her committee issued a report that debunked the whole episode. Salem redux.
When a society begins taking up accusations on a wholesale basis that children are being molested by parents, it's time to look to the society, whether that society is the Athenians, or Salem, or Britain, France, or the United States.
There is too much activity that is not of record in the proceedings of a warring family experiencing divorce and ongoing legal proceedings, and lackluster investigations conducted by police juvenile authorities and child protective services, to look uncritically at uncorroborated accusations of child sexual abuse. One of the biggest caveats is what is allowed to pass as "corroboration," a $64 word meaning nothing more than what you are willing to accept as support for a disputed proposition, i.e. evidence. Sometimes we let our theories substitute for the lack of credible evidence. This is fatal.
This is how the people of Salem allowed themselves to understand moles and wens on the body of the accused as being the locations where the devil had been allowed to suck like a vampire. Our worst-nightmare machine seems to work overtime when it comes to creating accusations against parents and nearby adults out of the mouths of children.
If you want to research the means, and the ease, by which children accommodate to authoritative adults who feed them nonsense, and believe it, see the work of Elizabeth Loftus and Stepheh Ceci, who showed through recorded experiments that children could be induced to speak quite falsely. See also Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Eye. You can find cites to these, and Salem, elsewhere on this blog by using the Google search feature in the left margin, or checking the lower left margin for other articles I've written based on my experience as a prosecutor and defense attorney. There is also an article here on investigating such cases.
Some day I'd like to read about an expert testifying in court about such examples to debunk the next outbreak of Cargo Cult Law, Medicine, and Science.
Richard Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, uses the term Cargo Cult Science to describe people who claim to be acting rationally but have missed the boat, essentially.
The worst offenders are doctors, lawyers, and scientists, naturally. They're as confused as any ignorant lay person, perhaps more, because they're confused at a higher level.
When these folks go astray, how can you believe ordinary mortals lacking advanced degrees?
Advanced degree, advanced confusion.
Common people, common sense. Sometimes, but not in France, England, or the United States.
It is often quite difficult to induce an individual to see, and then listen to, a psychiatrist, except in New York and Hollywood where this is a common as eating out.
It is next to impossible to place the entire nation of France, or the United States, into the hands of some Grand International Shrink (GIS), and then to pay attention.
We no longer have an effective United Nations, if we ever did. Why should we be surprised at the lack of an effective United Shrinks?
I'll tell you this: first an effective U.N., then an international United Shrink, perhaps under the aegis of the U.N.
Ah, I think I've got it: The U.N.G.I.S. (United Nations Grand International Shrink), headquarters in Geneva, as far away from Washington as we can get it. The Rule of Four. If four countries vote to refer your country, or its administration, or parliamentary body, or electorate, to the UNGIS, you have to go. And swallow the pills. And take the talk therapy. And make no war, slit no throats, in the meantime.
This is better than the Security Council.